Efraim Zuroff, the director of Jerusalem’s Simon Wiesenthal Center, was in Toronto and Ottawa this week to present the center’s annual report and launch a new program entitled Operation: Last Chance. The latest report gives Canada a poor rating at successfully prosecuting war criminals (“minimal success that could have been greater”).
“The problem is that the system is not streamlined,” said the centre’s chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff.
“For the past few years, eight cases against war criminals have been won by the government, they have been stripped of their citizenship, but with delay after delay, the government has not succeeded in kicking them out of the country.”
Even though other countries, like the United States and Italy, got high marks for its success in prosecuting and deporting war criminals, there are are still an estimated 10,000 Nazi perpetrators at large. This comes after a more productive year of prosecutions worldwide.